(NGOs) like Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Greenpeace or World ... with development goals like alleviating poverty and hunger (Care, World Vision,.
Charity Paradox
Helen Kopnina and Elze van Hamelen
Abstract “Charity Paradox” outlines conflict rather than complementarity in human and conservationist interests. Social and environmental problems are often presented in the media and common discourse as something that can be solved by the same formula. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Greenpeace or World Wildlife Fund (WWF) represent social movements with specific worldviews that are dealing with problems in society. While on the surface the societal contributions of NGOs may be seen from a complementary point of view, the paradox arises from their often conflicting problem-solving strategies. The substantial differences between human-interest and nature-centered charities lie at the level of their less explicit but quite fundamental goals. Divergent priorities given to either human or environmental (independent of human) interests, express themselves in either anthropomorphic or environmental bias in the choice of problem-solving strategies.
Keywords: charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development, poverty, conservation
Introduction This article outlines possible trade-offs between development-focused and conservationist non-governmental organizations (NGOs, or charities). The authors of this article contend that one interest focus creates a myopic view of a complex reality. Awareness of these possible conflicts can stimulate a search for more constructive solutions where trade-offs are optimized. Charities adressing the environment, for example, result in an increase of the level of consumption and population growth. Rise in human population and affluence may have a negative effect on conservationists’ efforts to preserve pristine natural areas. On the other hand, conservationists’ desire to protect certain wilderness areas may result in local peoples’ loss of livelihood and cultural habits central to their society, such as hunting or fishing. In other words, environmental protection programs, such as those banning the use of advanced agrarian technologies or the use of natural resources, can be harmful when looked upon from social, cultural or economic perspectives. Vice versa, that which is good for humans (economic security) may be damaging to the environment (population and affluence growth resulting in appropriation of pristine land).
The International Classification of Non-Profit Organizations (ICNPO), recommended by the United Nations, distinguishes twelve major activities of NGOs (Handbook on Non-Profit Institutions in the System of National Accounts 2003). Two groups are relevant for the purposes of this article: environmental and international. There are six subdivisions in the environmental group: natural resources conservation and protection, pollution abatement and control, wildlife preservation and protection, environmental beautification and open spaces, and animal protection and welfare. There are four subdivisions within the international group: exchange/friendship/cultural programs, development assistance associations, international disaster and relief organizations, and international human rights and peace organizations. This division is largely followed by Charity Navigator, America’s largest independent charity evaluator. It defines two causes for environmental charities: environmental protection and conservation; and botanical gardens, parks and nature centers. Charity Navigator defines four causes for international charities: development and relief services; international peace, security and affairs; humanitarian relief supplies; and single-country support organizations. Besides this distinction in sectoral focus, NGOs can be divided by orientation, meaning the type of organizational activity in which it is engaged (Vakil 1997). The terms NGOs, charities and non-profit organizations can sometimes be confusing, as they are often used interchangeably (Vakil 1997, Raju 2009). In this article, we assert that yet another distinction can be made between human-focused charities: those NGOs supporting human rights and giving aid in crisis situations (Amnesty, the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières) and those concerned with development goals like alleviating poverty and hunger (Care, World Vision, Oxfam). Environment-focused charities may be classified as broadly oriented, depending on how broadly the term environment is conceived. We may distinguish between at least four major types of environments: biophysical, natural, built and social. The biophysical environment is conceived as the world outside humans. Natural environment is similar to the biophysical one, with greater emphasis on the ecosystem, including all living and non-living organisms that occur naturally on Earth. The biophysical and natural environments, in common discourse, are mostly associated with nature or wilderness and are represented by NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace. The other two types of environment, built and social, refer to, respectively: humanconstructed surroundings, including public and private homes, and urban landscapes; and to the culture and society in which people develop and interact. NGOs concerned with those broadly conceived environments could be exemplified by organizations like Friends of the Earth and
Oxfam. For example, the way nature is conceived by Greenpeace may be much broader than the way WWF perceives it. While the Greenpeace agenda may include opposition to genetically modified crops and nuclear testing, WWF may prioritize protection of pristine environment and biodiversity as its prerogative. The two objectives may overlap, as in the case of planting monocrops that will affect pristine forests, yet priorities of both groups are often placed differently. A similar case may be made for international charities such as Amnesty International or War Child. While both may be inspired by general principles of protection of human rights, their focuses and priorities differ. Amnesty International promotes “human rights for all,” making their focus very broad. Their activities include ending violence towards women, defending the rights and dignity of those trapped in poverty, abolishing the death penalty, opposing torture and combating terror with justice, freeing prisoners of conscience, protecting the rights of refugees and migrants, and regulation of the global arms trade, to name some. These issues do not exclude children that are victims of war, though this is obviously not their main focus. This is in contrast toWar Child, which focuses strictly on children that are affected by war. If we consider statements of the world’s largest and well-known NGOs, then the distinction between human and environmental focus is apparent. It signals that the goals differ on an elementary basis and outlines probable conflict of objectives that may be mutually exclusive. The missions stated are clear in their purpose: The human-focused NGOs target the alleviation of poverty, human rights, social justice, aid and health. The conservationalist NGOs aim at conservation of the environment, independent of human interests. NGOs concerned with environment and/or human plight do not necessarily share the same objectives. The basic differences in ideologies – be they broadly defined by their human or conservation interest – underly interest groups’ mission statements (Kopnina and Keune 2010). These differences are also reflected in the literature. For example, P.J. Simmons mentions in his “Big Eight” of worldwide well-known NGOs list only NGOs with social purposes (1998). Hoffman gives a comprehensive typology of NGOs, but limits himself to those with an environmental focus (Hoffman 2009). However, some of the environmentalist statements do not exclude human interests entirely. An element found in these statements is the protection of humans against their own destructive activity. Greenpeace’s website says that it promotes peace by “working for disarmament and peace by reducing dependence on finite resources and calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.” According to this view, depletion of finite resources is damaging to the environment, though it becomes clear that this will backfire into humanity. Friends of the Earth state on their website that they “defend the environment and champion a more healthy and just world.” Their “current campaigns focus on clean energy and solutions to global warming, protecting people from toxic and new, potentially harmful technologies, and
promoting smarter, low-pollution transportation alternatives.” They are “dedicated to protect the rights of all people to live in a safe and healthy environment.” These statements show that protection of the environment can go together with human interests. The mission statement of Friends of the Earth reflects this view best. As it is not categorized as strictly conservationalist, we may call their strategy a “hybrid”: It reconciles conservationalists’ purposes with human interests. Recent attention of humanitarian charity Oxfam Novib to climate change illustrates the desire to move away from purely human-focused interest to include environmental interests as well. Their recent publications call attention to the fact that poverty increases people's exposure, and climate change increases the risks. Therefore, people living in poverty and poor communities are most vulnerable. This is due to a number of factors, such as the facts that most of these people live in overcrowded slum areas in unplanned, temporary settlements erected on unsuitable land with poor sanitation; a majority have limited access to clean water and maintain a poor diet; and inadequate health-care provisions undermine their resistance to infectious diseases. Oxfam’s website reports that as a result of these issues, between 1990 and 1998, 94 percent of the world’s 568 major natural disasters, and more than 97 percent of all natural-disaster-related deaths, were in developing countries. According to its website, Oxfam proposed a number of action areas to combat this problem, ensuring “that increasing numbers of people living in poverty who are harmed by climaterelated disasters have equitable and efficient access to relief.” Secondly, additional funding is required to protect the lives and livelihoods of the poor from “climate-related shocks and stresses, and to proactively adapt their livelihood strategies to the changing environmental conditions global warming brings.” Finally, Oxfam calls for “tackling root causes of poverty” by supporting calls for “strong political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent dangerous climate change.” We may conclude that the distinction between a human or conservationalist focus of charities is quite clear. However, some NGOs try to bridge the gap with so-called hybrid strategies.
Trade-offs and divergence between human and conservationist interests We found several illustrative articles that dealt with the contradictions and trade-offs that arise from pursuing environmental or human interests. These include an article by Professor Thaddeus Sunseri about tensions between local population and forest preservation and an article by E. Carter about conflicts of interest encountered in tourism between the host populations, tourists, tourism organizations and the natural environment. According to Sunseri, the 750 to one thousand villagers of Nzasa, Tanzania, were evicted from their homes as part of an environmental protection program that was run by the state and
supported by various international environmental NGOs. The Nzasa community had lived there for generations – since before colonial times – as farmers, pastoralists and charcoal burners. The charge of the state was that the locals were engaged in illegal activities, as they were living in a state reservation. However, the community was unaware of this fact. This eviction was part of the new forest protection program. The leading environmental NGO, Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania (WCST), employs biologists and conservationists with connections to U.N. Environment Programme, Care, World Bank, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and WWF. The Tanzanian state and NGOs regard peasants and pastoralists as the gravest threat to national forests. “Forced to choose between protecting endangered species and poverty alleviation, many conservationists opt for the former, seeing preservation as fundamental for the greater global good” (Sunseri, 2005). This is just one example. There are numerous others where the protection of rainforests, coastal forests and other natural habitats is detrimental to the local community. It clearly shows possible negative side effects when organizations pursue aims with a one-sided focus: The local community is a victim of lofty environmental concerns. Carter describes different scenarios when interests of population, tourist organizations, tourists and the environment are balanced against each other. The first scenario describes a win-win situation: There are instances where conservation and human goals align, of which energy conservation is the most obvious. The second scenario is identical with the trade-off described by Sunseri: The environment is protected through designation of national parks, but the local population is excluded from the land and their traditional activities. In addition, populations living adjacent to national parks experience inconvenience caused by wildlife damaging crops and livestock. The third scenario sketches a reversal of gains and losses: A development project creates a short-term gain for the local economy; however, a large area of natural land was cleared out, damaging the environment. The last scenario is the most depressing: The environment is being damaged by the tourist activities that made it attractive in the first place. Carter mentions the destruction of the coral reefs as an example. These substantial differences between human interests and nature-centered interests lie at the level of the less explicit but quite fundamental goals and objectives of charities. These derive from divergent priorities given to either human or environmental (independent of human) interests, expressing themselves in either anthropomorphic or environmental bias in the choice of problemsolving strategies. While on the surface, NGOs’ societal contributions may be seen from a complementary point of view, the paradox arises from the often-conflicting problem-solving strategies. The interest groups or stakeholders involved in the creation, inspiration and funding of NGOs may employ problem-solving strategies that could potentially create problems for another group and counteract others’ objectives. We may consider an example of the factors affecting
survival of a mere three thousand tigers in the wild, noting that environmental factors affecting the health and survival of tigers (such as poaching and destruction of natural habitat) are often quite different from those affecting human health in the same region. Conversely, a charity organization that supports human health by combating AIDS will have very different priorities than the charity concerned with the survival of tigers. The contradictions that arise from pursuing either environmental or human-interest goals do not take place independently, but have to be viewed from a larger perspective. In the following section, the deeper currents that underly the distinction and convergence between human and conservationist interests will be discussed.
Environmental interests and sustainable development The literature discussing NGOs in development perspective reflects the individual researcher’s stance toward devlopment. J. Ferguson situates critics of development within one of two general camps: those viewing contemporary development processes as flawed but basically positive and inevitable, and those viewing development as fundamentally flawed (Escobar, 1995). From the perspective of the first group of critics, NGOs provide a means to mitigate some of the weaknesses in the development process. The second group sees development as a historically produced discourse limted by Western-dominant visions (Fisher, 1995). Similarly to those criticizing development, opponents and proponents of the idea of sustainable development differ greatly in their understanding of the term. Current literature related to the effect of industrial capitalism on natural and social environments is unequivocal in the realization that at the present rate, the “global economy is crashing against the earth. For all the material blessings economic progress has provided, for all the disease and destitution avoided, for all the glories that shine in the best of our civilization, the costs to the natural world, the costs to the glories of nature, have been huge and must be counted in the balance of tragic loss” (Speth, 2008). In the 1980s, the United Nations set up the World Commission on Environment and Development (now the Brundtland Commission) to tackle the problems that were not appropriately dealt with in previous conferences. Until that time, environmental problems were addressed seperately from development concerns. In effect, the commission was established to marry the different goals of development and the protection of the environment (Greene 2002). The result was the Brundtland Report, which proposed the new strategy of sustainable development. About sustainable development, the report says:
Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities (Brundtland 1987).
It is not suprising that the commission came up with a definition that incorporates both objectives. However, did their approach to sustainable development solve a conflict between development and conservationist goals, or did they just create an oxymoron? What accounts for the popularity of the term sustainable development is precisely its anyone quality – an intrinsic vagueness, coupled with have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too essence. The two prime terms – sustainability and development – have somewhat contradictory meanings. Sustainability implies continuity and balance, while development implies dynamism and change. Thus, environmentalists are drawn to the sustainability angle, while governments and businesses (in practice, anyway) place the focus on development, usually meaning Gross Domestic Product growth (Giddens 2009). The Brundtland Report already pointed at the importance of this tension between current economic growth and the future planet’s well-being, sometimes labeled as the sustainability paradox (Krueger and Gibbs 2007, Latouche 2003). The report contains within it two key concepts: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the concept of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. It made clear that growth was essential, but it needed to be ecologically sound. The report did not address, however, the widespread belief that growth was the cause of environmental problems in the first place (Thomas 2001). The idea of sustainable development was further elaborated in 1992 during another major U.N. conference: the Earth Summit (Thomas 2001). The governments of developing countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and several African countries were not on board when development issues were not on the agenda. The summit was attended by environmental and developmental NGOs, while at the same time a parallel conference was held for NGOs only (Greene 2001). What followed from that conference was Agenda 21, a thorough document with a program for sustainable development. The core dilemma that sustainable development poses is the same as trade-offs described earlier in this article: Human and environmental interests do no always align. Particularly, they do not align when humans transgress boundaries posed by natural capacity or when general ethics are
compromised in pursuit of environmental protection. The Brundtland Report points to the tension between environmental and human concerns. This tension is further stressed by short-term and long-term goals. The Club of Rome answered the question that this tension posed: There are limits to growth. How far we are willing to stretch them or how to keep within our bounds is a question that needs to be asked (Meadows et al 1972). An important topic of public and policy debates concerning development and environment is that of population growth. Advances in medicine and technology, aided by the global spread of agricultural and industrial technology, resulted in unprecedented population growth. According to the U.S. Census Bureau website, the population grew by 79.4 million in 2007. And according to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, as of April 2009, there were 43,678,000 births registered per year, as opposed to about 18,980,000 deaths per year. The highest growth rates are registered in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. According to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the annual world population growth will peak in 2011 at 80.9 million. By 2050, the global population is forecast to reach nine billion. Population growth is still accompanied by poverty, low life expectancy and widespread disease, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the U.N. Statistics Division. Skeptical observers have noted that the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would be impossible to meet due to the increases in population growth. “No country has ever raised itself out of poverty without stabilizing population growth," said Richard Ottaway, vice-charmain of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, at a seminar on population issues in December 2006. "And the MDGs are going to be difficult or impossible to attain without a leveling out of population growth in developing countries” (Black 2006). Population growth and the negative effects thereof for both people (due to the supposed increase in the incidence of Malthusian disasters of disease, wars and famine) and nature (environmental degradation) were popular topics of public debates and policy focus throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. An accompanying trend was the unprecedented growth of migration from the South to the North and from the East to the West. While this migration has been increasingly restricted in recent decades (Kopnina 2007), humanitarian aid to developing countries has been steadily rising. Simultaneously, critics of restrictions on population control have raised their voices with concerns about population growth. The question of population control has been practically forgotten in favor of humanitarian concerns. Malthusian concerns became suspect as morally unacceptable as Western liberals increasingly owned the problems of the poor.
Thus, some fifty years after the heated concerns and debates about population growth (and with two billion more people inhabiting the earth), public and policy concerns have largely shifted to unequal distribution of wealth throughout the world and the fight against poverty and disease in developing countries. Representatives at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 failed to mention human population growth and increase in affluence levels as one of the possible problems.
Conclusion The fundamental difference remains that most human-interest charities may be described as anthropocentric in conceiving of the environment in rather functional, resource-related terms, while environmental charities generally place human interest outside the sphere of their objectives. Environmental charities work to preserve and protect the environment and to promote environmental research, conservation and appreciation. Some charities attempt to embrace both humanity and nature with projects that promote native peoples’ involvement in maintaining the forest (rather than chopping it down) for ecotourists, or that encourage a return to traditional way of life of the indigenous people by allowing them to keep and maintain their land in its pristine state. Sadly, though, many such idealistic projects have partially failed, as ecotourism has turned into mass tourism, or as those traditional hunters and gatherers preferred both to hunt and to sell their game to those with less traditional values. Most traditional or indigenous peoples have often abandoned bow and arrow in favor of Western tools and weapons. Well-meaning charity workers often fail to recognize the extent to which globalization, and to a certain degree Westernization, has shaped and altered values, beliefs and ways of life of the so-called traditional cultures. What often shapes human decisions throughout the world is not traditional culture and “ancient myths of the forest,” but quite prosaic economic interests. We need to note that the stakeholders within one or the other camp are rarely aware of the inherent conflicts, as well as possible connections, between their viewpoints. Yet, it is precisely through the interaction between humanistic and environmental interests that a more holistic understanding of such phenomena, as well as solutions to problems, can be achieved. While some progress is being made to bring the different goals of environmental conservation and development organizations together through international conferences and alternative economic approaches, the reality of NGOs and the goals they pursue show a different picture: that of divergence of social and environmental goals. Concerns with the global environment started in the 1960s, shortly followed by concerns with the developing world. While first being pursued seperately in global politics, both problems were later headed under the notion of sustainable
development. While the approach sounds appealing, it does not effectively address the inherent tension between development and conservationalist aims. This inherent tension is reflected in the distinct goals pursued by NGOs. However, with looming threats of climate change and overpopulation, both environmental and humanitarian NGOs beckon to a convergence of aims. It is the purpose of this article to raise the question of trade-offs and divergence between these purposes, and in the end to come to better results for both.
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